


Naturally recurring state characterized by reduced or absent consciousness

by orphan_account



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Gen, Implied Relationships, after the end, sleeping disorders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 07:38:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/809001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Third Impact. Right. That one. A destructive occurrence that most likely wiped the world clean, yet there he is, staring at the blue cloud-stained sky and inhaling fresh air.</p><p>shinji is a sleeping beauty looking for a prince (or maybe princess) to wake him up</p>
            </blockquote>





	Naturally recurring state characterized by reduced or absent consciousness

**Author's Note:**

> whats up  
> after reading articles about the sleeping beauty syndrome this thing came to mind  
> the story is kinda after the eoe
> 
> (first fic ever)

He wasn’t really fond of red. I mean, after seeing that same colour for so many years who wouldn’t feel sickened by the very thought? He felt that as if wherever he went, everything would still be red.

Like the logo of the organization that practically ruined his life. Or Asuka’s blood and Asuka’s hair and her plugsuit and her tongue and thoughts and temper and the ocean she laid by as he dug his dirty fingernails into her neck (which, coincidentally, was red too).

And when he finally woke up from the sound of the gentle brushing of the red waves, he could only think of Asuka, and what she said, himself crying as she uttered those words, and that irony taste of LCL, which returned to his mouth as he (much later) opened his eyes to see a ceiling. Another new, bright, colourless ceiling.

“I feel disgusting”, her voice echoed through his head.

He felt disgusting too.

He felt even more overwhelmed with his own repulsiveness as he moved his fingers for the first time in many years, and as a shocking and tingling feeling ran through his entire body, as if this was the first time he moved in his life. He turned to his side and cried, imagining a fierce red-haired girl scolding him.

“Stop whining”, she said.

The door opened and doctors of all kinds rushed in, fussing at each other in languages he didn’t quite understand. Shinji caught the word “sleep”, uttered in English, and he would sit up and scream but he didn’t really feel like it. He didn’t feel like anything. He still wondered where is he and does he still need to pilot the Eva and what is with all the fuss, but his tongue was numb and his lips were dry and he decided,

“Maybe some other time.”

\-----

He was forced out of bed and into a large room with expensive equipment, and after series of examinations and odd questions spoken in bad Japanese he was presented with tapes of himself, shot through the cameras installed in his room. The videos were primarily him sleeping, waking up, screaming, furiously masturbating and then falling asleep in that same spot. It was repulsive and unnecessary to show tapes like that to someone who had just woken up from a ten year long sleep.

Shinji was still unresponsive. He understood everything, but he did not speak, as if he forgot how to vibrate his vocal chords during the prolonged periods of rest (with small screaming/food breaks). The dark-haired boy stoically listened to the doctors ramble on about a certain syndrome, speaking in tongues of medical science which he never really comprehended. But he did speak once, his head still gloomily lowered, focused on his feet, trying to remember a name, a face, a glimpse.

“Where is she?”, he muttered slowly, calmly, and almost automatically, not even quite remembering who ‘she’ is, as the doctors picked up their pens and glanced at each other in surprise, almost as if they were expecting Shinji to never speak again. And then they furiously began documenting every moment of the conversation.

“Who do you mean?”, the head therapist asked in his crooked Japanese, not bothering to call a translator as he put on a concerned look on his face.

Shinji did not reply, not until he looked up and a glimmer returned to his eyes, and that moment he left the dream-like state and entered the vivid reality. He gasped, yet it was barely audible, but you could read his mind by the expression of horror mixed with sorrow on his face (it felt almost nostalgic for him to make that expression).

He was let go not long after being shoved into tight clothes and small shoes and told that he will be matched with a temporary custodian to look after him while he is still in recovery.

She had long red hair.

\-----

She was dressed in a nice black suit with a pencil skirt and black formal heels that clicked loudly when she walked. Her hair was very briefly tied, still letting most of it cascade down to her shoulders and her blue eyes were serious and hard.

He didn’t know her name. He felt like he didn’t need to, because a lingering feeling of nostalgia and deja-vu led him to believe that he already somehow knew her.

She followed him around silently wherever he went. Shinji sat on the porch in the yard behind the large building he felt he was trapped in against his will, she stood beside him as he counted the clouds.

“The doctors call you sleeping beauty”, the woman scoffed, brushing the bangs away from her face, smiling vaguely. Shinji didn’t look at her. The colour of her hair pained him to no end. The colour red made him squirm generally. “If you cooperate with us you will be released sooner.”

Shinji chuckled. It all still felt like a nightmare. As she spoke he briefly dug in his memory to recollect the happenings before he woke up. He remembered the Evangelions, and piloting one, and the sickening taste of LCL which remained in his mouth even after he woke up. He remembers a lot of red. And he clearly remembers something among the lines of the end of the world (those words left an impact on him and visibly the rest of the world).  
“I know how you feel”, she continued after a long pause, looking up, trying to see the sky through Shinji’s tired eyes, “I am a survivor of the Third Impact myself.”

Third Impact. Right. That one. A destructive occurrence that most likely wiped the world clean, yet there he is, staring at the blue cloud-stained sky and inhaling fresh air.

“You know”, she turned away, as if recollecting something, as if she forgot too, “The world didn’t rebuild itself overnight, Ikari.”

Her tongue clicked gently when she said his name and he was half-tempted to ask her for her own alias, but instead he stood there, drooling internally while playing that moment in his head over and over again.

\-----

Therapy was exhausting and unneeded, and because of it he ended up crying himself to sleep at night because something (strangely unknown) was pinching at his heart. 

He was no longer a boy, it hit him just recently. How old was he? Twenty? Twenty what? Far from fourteen. Shinji felt fourteen though. He felt that he hadn't grown an inch since he first fell asleep, his physical form did not occur him.

Shinji managed to pick up some facts about the location overtime. He was in New States, the Third Impact occurred eleven years ago, and he has been sleeping for ten and a half years, with small breaks for food, restroom and violent scream-crying. The controversy about who started the Third Impact grew rapidly, and they are still investigating who and what caused it. His supervisor said that he too will be questioned, but seemingly not as intensely as people who managed to keep their memories before the tragedy.

The psychotherapists constantly say how they will “help recover the lost memories”, but truly, Shinji didn’t want to remember. He wanted to stay in the faculty forever, without facing the issues, just avoiding them and all the conflict they carry. 

Often, they also try to talk about ‘her’ and who ‘she’ is, along with his self-esteem issues, cowardice and possible bipolar depression. But he just thought they were trying to label him for their own convenience. He didn’t want an excuse for feeling weak. So he just curled up in a ball and shamefully sobbed into his pillow.

\-----

“Do you remember what an Evangelion is?”

“Still trying to forget.”

Scribble scribble.

“What is your relation to the Evangelion series?”

“I was a pilot, I think.”

Whisper. Scribble scribble.

“Why did you agree to pilot it?”

Silence.

The entire room fell into a choking silence, which almost reminded the dark haired boy of something, but he didn’t care enough to look deep enough into it. The men in suits agreed to delay the questing for some time. No objections were raised.

Shinji received a brief nod for a greeting from the redhead as he exited the windowless room with thick walls and distasteful arrangement.

“How did it go?”, she asked him, her cold tone and businesslike, yet he could still feel a trace of warmth and concern for himself in her voice.

“They asked some questions, whispered and wrote down some stuff, that’s it”, he stated, looking to the side, trying to avoid catching even a tiny glimpse of the woman’s hair. 

Shinji noticed she was fidgeting, more nervous than usual, and he was just about to toss it aside as she disrupted his train of thoughts with her voice, softer than usual.

“Shinji”, she stopped abruptly, realising that she called him by his first name, and maybe the fact that he doesn’t need to know yet, she didn’t know why, but she stopped. And they left the menacing hallway and proceeded onwards.

\-----

Shinji heard rumours about her somehow connected to NERV. The staff gossiped about NERV and her a lot lately. It sounded familiar, and since everything in this faculty either has to do with his sleeping disorder, the Third Impact or the Evangelions, and so he assumed that it has to do with the latter two.

He said he never wanted to remember, but somehow he is still craving information about what actually did happen. It gave him a sense of goal, that he had some kind of a mystery to uncover and bad guys to punish, even though it was all still wishful thinking.

The boy was called into the office of the head doctor. His heart was pounding and his stomach twisted into a knot or tissue and acid. He slowly stepped towards the room, taking his time. He knocked softly at the door, and after pushing the door out of his way, he was confronted by a two pairs of eyes, glaring down at him.

“Shinji,” he paused, glimpsing at the other man standing beside the table, “Your, um”, he paused once again to clear his throat, and the small dramatic pauses were starting to irritate the boy, “Your custodian will no longer look after you. She was supposed to leave due to a, well, that doesn’t really matter to you anyways does it?”

He was ready to flip up the table and slap the man for saying such things. That she didn’t matter to him. He knew the redhead only for a couple of weeks, but it didn’t feel it. It felt they knew each other for years, or for their entire lives even and that they were essentially pieces of each other, they completed each other, like the red sea completes the blue skies and his demeanor completed hers and...

A pair of red slits met Shinji’s eyeballs and he was about to finish his thought, or maybe get a lead on his case of memory loss he secretly hoped to never solve.

“This man will be your new guardian until you leave the faculty,” the doctor stated matter-of-factly, but it seemed more like mocking to the boy. Shinji’s eyes met with his new keeper and he screamed silently as he sharply and mercilessly turned around on his heels and slammed the door closed.

\-----

Shinji could swear he did catch a taste of LCL in his mouth as he locked himself into his room and screamed for 2 minutes straight, up until he nearly collapsed due to the fact that he forgot that human beings have lungs they use to inhale air.

He laid down on the floor and stared at the ceiling for what seemed like hours, until he heard a knock on his door, and a familiar voice he never got to hear.

“Shinji, let me in.”

“Why?”

“Please, Shinji.”

He could not refuse to such a pathetically begging tone, so the boy hesitantly unlocked the door, briefly opening it before laying down on the floor once again.

The stranger came in, sitting down beside Shinji quietly.

“Shinji, how are you?”

“Please leave,” he snapped back, trying to hold back the tears and anger and disappointment, and mostly, confusion, “Leave me alone.”

“Sorry, I can’t.”

The words faded on his tongue as an awkward silence fell once again, crushing the two men sitting on a cheap carpet. Shinji sat up slowly, hanging his head down. He wasn’t sad anymore. He wasn’t really sad to begin with. He just hated the situation he ended up in, because everyone always ended up leaving him. On purpose. It’s never his fault. He’s completely innocent pertaining to every situation that had ever occurred.

“I don’t know what to do,” he whispered, smiling foolishly, looking up to the man sitting beside him with a soft look stretched across his face, “Help me, Kaworu...”

Shinji wheezed as the white-haired man jerked up, a terrified look marring his gentle face, surprise mixed with sadness and nostalgia in his eyes.

“W-what did you just call me?...”

Shinji didn’t respond. He didn’t want to. If he would, he’d scream, which he he deemed unnecessary, and plus he was getting tired and sleepy.

Memories were flooding in rapidly, one by one and suddenly he began remembering exactly why he hates the colour red, as he laid back down on the floor and fell asleep, for possibly another ten years, or maybe a month, or maybe permanently.

\-----

He woke up to the sound of the gentle brushing of the waves, and she sat there, her red hair cascading down from her shoulders, reaching the boy’s face. And for a moment he thought that the world had just ended, and he is in heaven.

“I feel disgusting.”

**Author's Note:**

> edit: fixed the thing that shinji didnt age bc it bothered me carry on


End file.
